


The Secret War

by cyranonic



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Agarthan lore, Angst, Dorothea writing experimental operas, F/M, Major Illness, Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27958301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyranonic/pseuds/cyranonic
Summary: Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg is dying. Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg cannot die. The Minister of the Imperial Household journeys deep into the ruins of Shambhala in search of a cure, but time is running out.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	The Secret War

When the ruins of Garreg Mach monastery finally come into sight, Hubert feels his lip curl in distaste. It has been seven years since he’s visited the place personally. And he knows that the feeling is irrational. The Church of Seiros has held no sway over the monastery since the days of the war. The cathedral, the cloisters, the mausoleum, all have been converted into a military outpost. The relics have been sold off to finance rebuilding and the paintings have been either rescued by the devout when they fled or scrubbed away into dust. 

Hubert feels no remorse for these things. The loss of beauty does not pain him. He feels no twinge of nostalgia for the place where once, long ago now, he was a student.

Instead, all he can think when he sees the shape of the monastery on the horizon is that this is yet another in a long and sordid line of places that have tried to take Edelgard from him.

He slips through the gates unnoticed, dressed as but another traveller bound for the market village. Few people would recognize his face, anyways. Hubert von Vestra is not a name often spoken in the new empire that Edelgard has forged from the broken remnants of Fódlan. He would prefer to keep it that way.

But as he makes his way around the entrance hall, his mind slips for just a moment and he recalls an early evening long past when he knelt here, scoping away the rubble of the walls that he himself had torn down. Edelgard had been beside him then, the golden light of sunset beginning to reflect from her pale hair. And she had been smiling. Her smiles were so rare. She had smiled and said it’s rather impressive how well we destroyed this place. And despite himself, he had laughed. 

And then he recalls her face when he had left Enbarr.

She had been lying in bed. Working as usual. Always working even when she was so weak she could hardly stand. When he had entered, Ferdinand had passed him in the hall and murmured that she hadn’t eaten yet that day. And Hubert had smiled thinly and told him he would handle the matter. He was the Minister of the Imperial Household, after all. It was his job.

But when he had entered the room and seen her, she had looked up and smiled at him. Smiled even though she was exhausted and in pain and probably at least somewhat frightened. And for a moment, he had nearly forgotten how to do his job properly. 

And now he is at Garreg Mach again. He is at Garreg Mach because his responsibilities have taken him there and he is not so pathetic yet that he will admit defeat. 

There are two facts that he must contend with:

Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg is dying. 

And, Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg cannot die. 

Hubert considers himself a rational man, led by cold, dispassionate truth, and not by whim and fancy. It makes the fallacy of his current situation all the more vexing. 

No one notices when he slips down into the grate behind the dormitories. Hubert would fault the guards for their negligence, but he also must be realistic about his particular skill set. He seeps back into the darkness like it is his home. He leaves no trace behind him when he goes. 

There is a man in furs and a heavy iron helmet waiting at the main gates of Abyss. Hubert knows that there are thousands of ways in and out of the labyrinthine complex. He would be foolish to assume that Yuri would not notice if he used one of those instead. 

The man at the gate does not so much as nod when he passes. He appears entirely absorbed in peeling an apple with his knife. Hubert smiles to himself. Yuri will be expecting him then. 

Abyss is a slight annoyance to Hubert. He prefers to be the only one familiar enough with the shadows to use them to his advantage. Abyss is outside of his control. Abyss festers pockets of revolution and danger. 

And if Hubert ever so much as meddled in the affairs of the lowliest bootlegger in Abyss, he is certain that Yuri would cut his throat out in an alley and no one would ever find his body. 

Hubert does not like people who remind him too much of himself. It is only practical. 

The subterranean city is wet and sticky that evening as Hubert picks his way through the vendors of Burrow street. He catches a glimpse of an Almyran woman selling what is absolutely stolen Imperial cannon shot and nearly stops, but he forces himself to continue. As loathe as he is to admit it, he needs Yuri to like him right now. 

It is not difficult to find the defender of the Abyss. Hubert can hear him before he sees him. He has a clear tenor voice that soars and echoes in the cavernous underground. After the war, Edelgard had offered him Imperial patronage to remain in Enbarr and restore the Mittelfrank to glory, but he had refused it. 

As Hubert steps into what looks like the ruin of an old crypt, he sees Yuri standing atop a mausoleum. Dorothea is sitting below him, her arms holding his leg in a pose of adoration. Their voices twine together, harmonizing and then breaking into strange discord. The song ends strangely, without resolution. Yuri is dressed oddly in furs while Dorothea is in her signature red. 

“An interesting performance,” Hubert says dryly into the silence. “I am certain it would not suit in the capital at all.” 

“That’s kinda the whole point, I’m afraid,” Yuri says with a lazy smile jumping down from his place atop the stone coffin. “Theatre for the people, not the emperor's fat little house cats in Enbarr.” 

Hubert laughs at that, a dark, low laugh in the back of his throat. It is an old disagreement between them. The same disagreement that drove Dorothea away from Edelgard’s side after so many years of loyal friendship. 

Yuri has no patience for change. He would have seen Edelgard throw down the old nobility overnight even if it cost thousands of lives in yet another pointless rebellion. 

“Hubie,” Dorothea says, more cautious, but more warm. “To what do we owe the honor? You can’t be here to see our show.” 

“What is this little opera called?” Hubert asked without much interest. “What do the sophisticated people of Abyss prefer to see on the stage?” 

“Tits mostly,” Yuri replies cheerfully. 

“It’s called _The Flame Emperor at Tailtean_ ,” Dorothea fills in. “I’ll be doing Edie, of course. How is she?” 

Dorothea says it with such genuine interest. Hubert’s considerable powers of observation nearly fail to catch the edge of deadly sharpness in her expression. Dorothea, he must recall, is no less of a radical than Yuri is, she just prefers to wrap her razors in softer silk. 

“The Emperor sends her regards,” Hubert says. “In fact, I am here on her behalf.” 

“Does she want a ticket?” Yuri jokes. He is prowling around the room as they speak. It is likely a meaningless posture, designed to put Hubert on edge. He keeps his eyes on Dorothea, although his hand beneath his cloak rests on his knife. 

“Regrettably, the Emperor is unaware of my presence here,” Hubert replies stiffly. “Much of her business I attend to before she need request it.” 

“Well then, Hubie, there’s no need to keep circling the question like the great big vulture man I know you are,” Dorothea says with a tinkling laugh. “You can ask for anything. We’re all old friends here.” 

Are we, Hubert wonders, or are we merely people who have seen all of the most violent parts of one another?

“I am looking for an Agarthan,” Hubert says silkily. Dorothea quirks her head, looking puzzled. 

“Hubie, I thought you’d gotten rid of all of Those Who Slither in the Dark?” Dorothea said. “Wasn’t that what kept you and Jertiza and the dear professor busy for so many years after the war?” 

“I attended to the issue of Thales after the war,” Hubert says with a smile. “Personally. But rats do not run just because you kill the largest. They creep in through many little cracks so long as there are still crumbs for them to steal.”

“What makes you think I’d be harboring Agarthans here?” Yuri asks from somewhere behind him. Hubert has braced himself for this. He does not flinch. “Never liked them much.”

“Do not bother to pretend,” Hubert responds, his words growing colder as he tires of this conversation. “There was a woman down here for a time. She wore a veil over her face. Some say she would pray at the altar alone, day and night.” 

“Ah, you mean the mad woman?” Yuri asks. “Harmless creature. I never saw her practicing blood magic.” 

“Is she still here?” Hubert presses him. Yuri smiles. There is glitter on his cheeks which glistens faintly in the torchlight. 

“She left, I’m afraid. About a year ago, actually,” he says, “she said she was going home.” 

“And you have found no more of her kind here?” Hubert asks. Despite himself, he is growing impatient. He is already so pressed for time. 

“Nope,” Yuri says lightly. 

“We swear it, Hubie,” Dorothea adds. “We have no reason to keep something like that from you.” 

Hubert feels a muscle twitch in his jaw. So there is nothing here. Yet again, there is nothing. 

“Is Edelgard okay?” Dorothea asks more quietly. Her eyes have softened slightly from that viciousness-hidden-in-luxury look that she favors. It reminds him more of the girl he would catch weeping after every battle. 

“The Emperor is--” Hubert begins to say, but then something terrible happens. A disaster. An unmitigated failure. 

The words stick in his throat. 

Dorothea’s eyes go very tender. Hubert wrests himself from the humiliating grip of her pity with a snarl. 

“She will be fine,” he finishes. 

He turns to leave. 

“The woman with the veil,” Dorothea calls after him. “When she went home, she booked passage to Hrym.” 

Hubert pauses and then nods over his shoulder. 

“Come see the opera,” Yuri says as he strides off. “It should be finished by the time you’ve made your social calls.” 

Hubert leaves Abyss. He buys a horse and rides for Hrym. 

A part of him is aware that what he is doing is foolish. He ought to take a battalion of men with him where he is going, or at least a companion to watch his back. When he last visited the City Without Light, he had been with two of the finest warriors in Fódlan: the fell star and the death knight. Even in its current state, Shambhala is bound to be dangerous. 

And on top of that, a part of him is aware that what he is doing will be futile. He is not a healer. He has never had the capacity for faith. He has studied poisons instead of medicines. Linhardt is the one who can save Edelgard. Linhardt is the one who they are all waiting on to cure her. 

And yet another, much stronger part of his spirit recoils at the idea of waiting at Edelgard’s bedside for yet another day and watching her fade. He needs to make himself useful. What good does it do him to waste time idling outside of her door, pathetic as he rests his head against the wood to reassure himself that he can still hear her labored breathing? 

And so he is searching for an Agarthan so that when Linhardt manages to pull the second Crest out that is slowly consuming Edelgard’s body, he will be able to repair the damage that it has done. The Crest of Flames has been festing inside of her for too long, burning within her until all that is left is ash. As Linhardt had put it so bluntly, in his strangely caring-uncaring way, “her body needs at least a memory of when it was healthy.” She needs a transfusion from as close of a match as they can find to her natural quintessence. And that is something that, given her history, only an Agarthan would likely possess. 

Edelgard has no living siblings. Her father is long buried and the transfusions they have acquired from distant cousins have done nothing. But someone, somewhere in Fódlan, must have samples of the Hresvelg children, after all of their years of misery. Someone must. The alternative is impossible to think about. 

The forested hills above Shambhala are utterly unremarkable looking. The weather is overcast and rain has fallen in grey sheets on and off throughout the day. Hubert wears an oilskin over his travelling clothes. Water drips from the end of one dark lock of hair and into his eyes. 

He ties the horse to a tree and then he walks into the clearing. There is a dark crack in the ground, a strangely irregular crevice that drops into blackness. Moss has grown over the steel and Hubert can faintly hear the sound of rain hitting metal below. 

He pries the doors further open. One of the javelins of light used to nest inside of this bay, a long elegant piece of machinery, so finely crafted and innate that even Adrestia’s greatest minds have not yet dissected it to his satisfaction. 

Hubert sheds the oilskin and then lowers himself into the darkness. His boots hit water when he lets go, the pooled refuse of many months open to the elements sloshing around his knees. 

It is dark beneath the ground, but Hubert forces open the bay door and beyond it he sees the cool blue lights of Shambhala still flickering. Whatever magic powered this place before is failing and the glowing lines threading through the metal of the walls now shiver and blink off in irregular flashes. Hubert moves through the hallway, the shuddering lights making his careful movements look stilted and strange. 

Against one wall, Hubert sees a dark stain, blood long ago congealed into a rusty paste. His own work, perhaps, or, more likely, Jeritza’s. 

At the end of the hall, the sliding door has been forced open and now lies propped between the walls. Hubert bends to pass under it, entering into one of the massive chambers where the Agarthans had made their final stand. The dark chapel looms ahead of him, still glowing a painful blue-white from within. But he has no business with the rotted remains of Thales. 

Hubert bends down to check the ground for signs of habitation. No fresh prints on the floor here. The droppings of a few small animals that have likely made their way into these abandoned halls now that the gates have been left open. Hubert feels his teeth clench together. Edelgard has always harbored a distaste for rodents. 

His momentary distraction is enough to catch him off-guard when the enormous iron arm of a Titanus slams into him. The taste of copper fills his mouth as he head hits the floor and then his vision mists over into a blur. 

The day when she had first gotten sick. 

A childish misnomer, he scolds himself. She had been sick ever since the Insurrection. 

But, nevertheless, the day when she had first risen from taking tea in the palace gardens and then fallen. Hubert had not caught her. 

It had been Ferdinand who had taken her arm and steadied her. Hubert had not risen quite fast enough. Or perhaps he had not believed, not truly until that moment, that she would lose her balance. 

“I will summon a healer,” Hubert had told her softly once she was seated again and Ferdinand had left to get her a glass of water. She had shaken her head. Her hair had been down that afternoon. Strands of silver had shifted against her collar. 

“Not yet,” she had said. He had noticed that day how thinly drawn her lips always were. “Sit with me awhile.”

“You are unwell--” he had begun to say. 

“Just sit with me for a while longer,” she had interrupted. “Please.” 

The day when she had first gotten sick. She, of course, would have counted that day much earlier. He understood as much now. 

He still lay awake and wondered, however, why she had wanted to prolong the illusion for another ten minutes as they sat together in the garden of the Imperial palace. 

Hubert is not a man whose presence is a comfort. 

He comes to his senses a few seconds later, lying on the ground with blood bubbling down his lips. It takes him a moment to regain sensation in his body. He can feel something wet in his hair, likely blood, but his vision focuses, which means the damage is not too severe. 

Hubert rolls onto his back and sees the massive body of the Titanus. Or rather, he sees approximately half of a Titanus. The construct is limping, dragging a deadened left side as it moves to swing towards him again. 

He throws himself to the side in time to dodge the second slame of its fist down into the ground. The sound rings out around him painfully. Anyone he might have surprised is certainly now aware of his presence. 

Hubert spins a glyph in his hands, summoning magic stronger than he had wished to use. The lunar energy saps the life from the Titanus and Hubert feels his fingers growing cold as the magic bleeds quintessence from his veins as well. The lights inside of the construct flicker and it jerks, convulsing and sagging towards the damaged left side. Hubert grits his teeth. The cold is travelling up his forearms now. 

Then the Titanus goes limp. Hubert lies panting on the floor. He spits blood from his mouth and then wipes his chin. 

Gingerly, he removes one of his gloves, noticing the pallor of his fingers and the blistering dull red spots now blooming around his nails. He touches the side of his head to inspect the damage there, but he cannot find any fracture or softness. Head wounds always do bleed the most, he thinks. 

Slowly, Hubert rises to his feet. The Titanus is sparking now and he can smell something acrid leaking from between the metal plates. He ought to keep moving, at least to put some distance between him and the sound. If there are Agarthans still hiding in the ruins, he has to hope that they will attribute the noise to the construct malfunctioning. Nevertheless, he is leaving wet bootprints across the filthy floor. 

One of his ears is still ringing by the time he reaches the labs. He has been here before, almost seven years ago, when he destroyed this place. 

The lab itself is plain. The glass walls between the rooms have been shattered and now shards crunch beneath his feet like sand or glittering diamonds. The long sterile benches still have the smashed remains of empty vials, of syringes, of scales and delicate instruments, scattered across them. A stool lies on its side at the center of the room. 

Then there is the table. It is seven feet long. There are several sets of thick leather restraints, now dangling loose and unlocked. 

It is the last room that he wants to check, although it is a desperate place to search. The power has been on and off here, clearly, and whatever samples were once stored in the enormous freezers are likely useless by now. Still, he checks. 

One of the freezers is warm inside when he opens it. There is a fetid, chemical stench that he cannot put a name to emanating from the samples. Much of it is blood, naturally. He reads each vial, carefully parsing the Agarthan script to look for the presence of a Crest. There are several vials of murky liquid, some of it dried to a gummy paste, with the Crest of Seiros inscribed on the label, but all are dated much too recently. 

He finds a few others. A Crest of Cethleann with dates that clearly coincide with a regrettable incident of his schooldays. A Crest of Blaiddyd that is faintly alarming and mysteriously old. A Crest of Gloucester that he suspects might be related to the other one, the younger girl. 

Whatever did happen to her, he wonders, after the war? The Ordelia family had sided with the Empire after Claude had officially surrendered to them at Derdriu. Where had their daughter gone? He ought to have made it his business to know something like that. 

He knows the weakness inside of him that made him ignore the question for so many years. It is like a bruised fruit, a disgusting soft part of himself that he cannot examine too closely. 

Dorothea had asked him once if he suffered from “unrequited love” for Edelgard. The question had offended him at the time. He had answered with confidence that his service was done out of some far loftier feeling. A sense of destiny entwined, of goals aligned, of a shared vision. 

Now, he thinks, his answer was only half-right. He does not serve Edelgard out of unrequited love. That is merely the reason he so consistently fails her. 

When he opens the second freezer, he hears a low hissing sound. He steps back at once, but darkness is already beginning to creep into the corners of his vision. He stumbles as he backs away, pulling the scarf around his neck up and over his face. 

He feels a sharp pain as he falls to one knee, the broken shards of glass on the floor easily puncturing through his trousers. His lungs burn. 

The night before the battle in Fhirdiad. 

Her nightmares were a frequent inconvenience. He would hear them through the walls sometimes at the Officers Academy. She never screamed. She never got up to pace for hours and hours as Hubert so often overheard when he passed the Faerghan prince’s room late at night. She always lay there, completely still, making only the faintest of whimpers. 

He had considered these dreams to be a manageable issue. He would offer her sleeping tonics if they seemed to disturb her rest, but otherwise, he did not wish to humiliate her with questions about her nightly terrors. 

But the night before the battle, the night before Fhirdiad had burned. 

He had heard frantic, ragged breathing from her tent. He had entered, against his better judgement, unable to shake the fear of finding an assassin within. 

Instead, her eyes had snapped open at the sound of his entrance. They had stared at one another for a long moment, two allies so used to being each other’s only confidant that it was as though they had suddenly met for the first time. 

“Stay with me,” Edelgard had said. There was a question in her raspy voice, still rough from the panicked breathing of her nightmare. 

“If that is what you command,” he had replied stiffly.

“It’s not…” she had said, turning onto her side and pressing a shaking hand to her eyes. “It’s not a command.”

Hubert very rarely found himself torn between options. He usually had no qualms about doing what he must. 

Because if Edelgard’s words were not a command, but rather a request, his choice suddenly became a confession. That he wanted to stay because… 

Because he wanted to stay. He always wanted to stay with her. And yet without an order to bind him to her side, he was paralyzed. Why was it so easy to fight for her, kill for her, rip the world to shreds so she could build it anew, and so hard to do one simple thing? To stay with her. 

That night he had hesitated, second-guessed himself, fumbled at the flap of the tent. And then he had gone to sit on the floor beside her bedroll. He had kept his eyes averted. He had imagined her staring at him. 

He had stayed the whole night. It set an unfortunate precedent. 

That night before the battle in Fhirdiad. 

The pain in his knee gives him the focus to scrabble back to his feet and out of the lab. He has to force a sliding door open when it jitters and refuses to move. Then he leans against the wall and draws deep, even breaths until his vision is clear and his hands stop shaking. 

Whatever poison he has just inhaled doesn’t seem to have killed him. He bends down and pulls a piece of glass from his knee, the joint buckling slightly as he removes it. But his face stays neutral. He has been trained in torture, both to administer and to withstand it. A few slivers of glass are merely inconvenient. A waste of his only elixir when he takes it in one long drink, standing with his back to the wall. 

He limps along the wall until he finds the panel for the network. His knee knits slowly back together as he moves. The panel is still open, flung onto the ground seven years ago when Hubert had held his knife to the throat of a pale, squirming mage and forced him to explain how to shut everything down. 

Hubert stares at the wall of blinking lights and symbols when he reaches it, hesitating as he tries to remember the arcane terms for concepts he barely understands. He punches a code in slowly and awkwardly. The machine can tell him how many connections in the city are still using its powers, if he can only remember the terms. The mage had been babbling when he’d done it, frantically saying terms like node and packet switching while Hubert’s knife had pressed ever deeper into the soft flesh of his neck. 

But obtaining the list is a simple enough task for the half-broken machine. As long as he has the administrator code, the machine will spit out a list of meaningless combinations of Agarthan script on its glass reader. Hubert has no idea what all of the devices still accessing network power are. He assumes it is partially why the lights have stayed on. Perhaps it is also how the Titanus found him. 

He spots an anomaly as he reads the list. Something called basecom.ll.serverdensity is recording several unnamed devices accessing the network, the randomly generated numbers flashing again and again as the screen updates every few seconds. 

Someone else is here then, Hubert thinks with a hard smile. And they are connecting something directly to one of the Agarthan servers that still has power. 

The lower level, then, he thinks grimly. If he cannot find any signs of life here in the heart of the city, then he must venture lower, into the warren. The levels below contained the great throbbing machines, the humming generators, and pulsating crystals that Hubert’s top experts have still not managed to comprehend. 

It irritates him. It irritates him that there are still uses in the world for Those Who Slither in the Dark. He would have preferred them comfortably destroyed, without any lingering longing in the more coldly rational part of his mind for their knowledge. 

The lower levels are deep in the roots of the mountain. When his soldiers cleared the ruins of Shambhala seven years before, there had been massive metal cages that were drawn by cables from floor to floor. 

Now, when Hubert pries his way through another pair of sealed doors, eventually giving up and blasting his way through the metal with a few more charges of dark magic, he finds an empty shaft. Darkness yawns up from above and below as he sticks his head out to examine the cavernous duct. 

The thought occurs to him with a sinking sensation in his gut. He will need to climb. There is a ladder built into the side of the shaft, probably to access the panels still glowing intermittently around the sides. He has always harbored the most ridiculous fear of falling. 

Hubert steps down onto the first rung of the ladder and begins to climb down. He climbs until his hands are shaking and dampening his gloves with sweat. His shoulders ache, and still the shaft plunges deeper. Hubert pauses for a moment to push a lock of hair out of his eyes, his arm trembling as he moves it. 

Distantly, he hears something humming. 

He keeps climbing, forcing his mind to keep its focus on the task of placing his feet and hands where they will not slip. The humming is growing louder. And there is something else. Something scraping and flickering. 

He looks up. 

The steel cage is sliding down towards him, slipping in erratic bursts and sending up a shower of sparks as it does. Its sides are nearly flush with the wall and if it hits him, he will be scraped off of the ladder like dried mud from a shoe and plunge to the very bottom of the underground city. 

Hubert does not often feel afraid. Even in battle, his thoughts have been more concerned with preserving Edelgard than his own life. And he has never been a reckless fighter. He favors a tactical retreat over a defiant last stand. There had been close calls. Every war had its close calls. But he had never felt the overwhelming sense of panic that he feels as the elevator cage plummets another twenty feet towards him. 

There is no way for him to move faster. He simply keeps climbing down. It feels absurd to carefully place his feet on the rungs of the ladder below, but if he falls now, his fate will be the same. 

Metal groans from above and he feels a spark hit his face. 

He finds the doors just as he hears the sound of the last cable snapping above him. There is no time to pry them open, he merely presses himself against the wall, feet barely balanced on the narrow ledge, and flinches when the massive metal platform comes roaring past him. The wind from its descent ruffles his clothing and he nearly over balances, pitching forward into the depths. 

There is a squeal from below as the elevator catches against something again. Hubert slams his palm into the door release button and topples backwards into the hallway. 

It is darker down here. The inhabitants of Shambhala left the service corridors and maintenance passages sparsely lit. There are no decorative patterns of light in the walls down in the lower levels, merely single veins of flickering blue. 

Hubert lies on the floor for a moment, feeling his heart rate declining and the bile in his throat slowly settling. Foolish, he admonishes himself, to feel such sudden fear for his life. If he has ceased to be useful alive, what should it matter if he is dead, his body lying broken at the very bottom of the world? 

Another memory surprises him then. Edelgard’s coronation. Not the first one, the breathless, secret one with her father in Enbarr. He recalls her coronation as the first Emperor of Fódlan. 

She had been terrified. 

“I can’t do this, Hubert,” she had said as he laid the ermine cloak over her shoulders. 

“I will cut a path for you, Lady Edelgard. You will not falter. Not now,” he had reassured her. 

“It was never supposed to end like this,” she had said, knocking at the heavy breastplate she wore with one gauntleted hand. “They expect too much from me. The point was to break the world so that it could grow unhindered, not rise up as a new idol in place of the old.” 

“Destruction is fast,” Hubert had reminded her. “Growth is slow.” 

“It is too slow, Hubert,” she had said, beginning to tug at the straps of her armor like it was crushing her. “I don’t have time to spare. I cannot wait any longer. Otherwise, we will lose. After everything I have done, Hubert, we cannot lose.” 

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert had said, calm and restrained as ever. “It is time now. You must crown yourself.” 

She had stilled at that. Her violet eyes had met his. 

“Promise,” she had whispered, “that if I go, you will not leave me out there alone.” 

“I will remain at your side, Lady Edelgard,” he had promised, “for as long as we both shall live.” 

And yet, when she had stepped out into the hall packed with nobles and soldiers and cheering classmates, he had remained in the shadows and watched. At the time, he had thought nothing of it. The shadows were his place, as the light was hers. 

It only occurs to him, as he is lying on his side on the floors of the basement of Shambhala, that this was one of many occasions where had broken his oath.

As long as they both shall live then, he thinks as he pushes himself back to his feet again. There is no sense in wasting more of that. 

At the end of the hall, he finds a long rectangular chamber. The walls are covered by metal cabinets, light blinking from behind a thin mesh of steel that locks the devices inside. It is very cold down here. Hubert can hear air still whistling through the ducts and out from the vents. 

He walks slowly and quietly, hoping to keep his position secret from anyone hiding down here. At the end of the room, he can see that some of the doors to the cabinets have been opened. Soundlessly, he prowls to the end of the room, knife bare in his hand now. 

He waits for a few seconds and hears no movement. With one hand, he touches the edge of the cabinet door, and then quickly he snaps it closed. 

On the floor, he can see a mess of cables plugged into the flickering servers. And lying beside them, there is a body. He kneels to check it, even though he can tell from sight alone. 

Dead. Long dead, it seems. At least a year old by the state of decay. It appears female by the remains of its clothes. 

So that is all, then. That is the extent of this. 

There are deductions to be made here. 

The Agarthan woman died a year ago. There is nothing left to find of the Hresvelg child experiments. This was a dead end. 

And Emperor Edelgard will die. She will die because her body has been burning alive for so long that without the poison in her veins, her marrow will not supply her blood with quintessence anymore. 

She will die alone. Because he is here, hurt and afraid in the ruins of Shambhala, and not at her side. 

He feels his knees hit the floor, but the pain is dull. He bends forward until his forehead is pressed against the icy cold metal as well. He feels his breathing catch in his throat. 

Emperor Edelgard will die. There is no heir. Nobleman will squabble over the scraps of the briefly united Fódlan. Armies will form and the vacuum will yawn, inviting chaos and opportunity. Almyra will march from the east. Bandits will crown themselves lords of their little holdings. It will fracture. There is nothing left to hold it together without Edelgard. And the work will have been in vain. 

Hubert lifts his head and feels something burning hot dripping from his chin. He raises his elbow to wipe it away. He must be reasonable. He must make a plan, formulate a strategy, calculate his odds. 

But Edelgard will still die. He squeezes his eyes shut again and breathes shakily through his teeth. 

“I didn’t kill her,” a voice says from behind him. 

Hubert is on his feet in seconds, his hand out and prepared to call upon his magic even with tears still drying on his cheeks. 

A woman is standing in the doorway. Her face is veiled. 

“She had taken something, I think, before I returned to this place,” the veiled woman says softly, gesturing to the body on the floor. “I hope it was painless.” 

“Returned,” Hubert says, with all the dignity of a man who has just been cornered by his own quarry. “From Abyss, I suppose?” 

“From many places,” the woman agrees. “I have lived in so many places as so many people.” 

“How many with your own face, I wonder?” Hubert asks, moving a few steps closer to see if she will retreat. If he can corner her against the elevator shaft, he might gain some leverage. 

“A Vestra ought to know better,” the woman says. She does not move from the doorway even as he approaches. “My kind are far from the only people in Fódlan to wear many guises.” 

“Then why veil yourself?” Hubert asks. “The sun will not burn you down here.” 

“I am in mourning,” she answers simply. “I must wear the veil.” 

“If you surrender now,” Hubert warns her, “I will make things easy for you.”

“That is a bold lie,” the woman says, “for a man with so many hidden blades.” 

“I will give you a death like your friend,” Hubert smiles coldly, “as opposed to a death by Jertiza.” 

“And what of the death of the Emperor?” the woman says. Her veil makes her expression into nothing but a faint shift of shadows. Hubert keeps his body from reacting when she says it, although he wants to tighten his grip on the knife behind his back. “I do not believe that to be an easy passing, even if she has been spared the blade.” 

Hubert says nothing, reveals nothing. 

“That is why you are here, Vestra,” the woman says after a pause. “You wish to save the Emperor’s life. You would even use the same blood magic they used to make her, if it could only preserve her for a few more years. It will be futile either way.” 

“Oh, I believe we will have to disagree on that,” Hubert says with a dark laugh, beginning to move again, very slowly. He keeps his posture casual, hoping it will set her at ease. 

“You have always been an impatient man,” the woman says and her tone is faintly derogatory for the first time. “Agarthans know this. They use it against you. You think you have won because you have soaked this city in blood, but all the survivors need to do now is wait. Wait until the Emperor’s brief life burns out and they find Fódlan lovingly prepared for them. No more leaders. No more church. No more opposition.” 

“I will not allow that to happen,” Hubert snarls, dropping all friendly pretense. 

“You already have,” the woman says. And now she sounds sad. She sounds so strangely sad. “Even if Edelgard lives another year, another twenty, another forty, the result will be the same. The virus will replicate and once she is gone, then Agartha will grow in soil made rich by her ashes. All it requires is patience.”

“She will not allow that to happen,” Hubert insists, summoning a glyph and taking aim. 

“She has no choice,” the woman says. He is close enough now to see the veil shifting when she speaks. “She is only one woman. She can do nothing alone. I found that out many years ago.”

Hubert is about to release the spell, hoping to mire her feet and catch her before she runs. There is still the table with restraints above. He will find a way to make her talk. 

But then one pale hand reaches up and brushes the veil back, pulling the dark net over chestnut colored hair. 

The woman he sees is old, but in the ageless way of those who slither in the dark. Her skin is lined, but still taught across her cheeks. And she is familiar. Not from his own memory. But she has that heart-shaped face, those same violet eyes. 

He freezes. 

“I did so much just to return to her. Just to see her again,” the woman says carefully. She has Edelgard’s same close-lipped smile. “And then I ran instead. I abandoned her because I believed I could not save her. Not once they had Volkhard.” 

“Anselma,” Hubert breathes. “Forgive me if I do not bow. Your royal status has been somewhat questionable of late.” 

The woman nods calmly. He lowers his hand. He cannot touch her now. 

“I will give you what you want,” she finally speaks again. “I will give her a few more years, I hope, a whole lifetime if your healers are as skilled as they say. But I ask that you do not force me to come to Enbarr. She should not be forced to see my face again.”

“Why, then?” Hubert asks. 

“Because she deserves a life, even if it will not change the inevitable,” Anselma says. “Because I have let her down so many times before.” 

“Why won’t you return to Enbarr?” Hubert rephrases the question. “Why won’t you stay with her this time? Why won’t you tell her that you love her when she needs to hear it from you?” 

Anselma fixes him with a knowing look. Those familiar, unfamiliar violet eyes seem to cut through him and lay bare everything he holds inside. 

Then she reaches up and draws the veil back over her face. 

“Because I am still in mourning,” she says. “Not for my daughter. But for my son.” 

It takes Hubert a second to comprehend. Then he nods. 

“Not to Enbarr, then,” he says. “I will allow that little mercy.” 

The next time he visits Abyss, it is to see an opera. 

It is a strange place for one. They hold the performance in a vast echoing stone chamber that makes the voices of the singers reverberate long after they have finished their notes. 

The crowd is exceptional as well. Most of them stand for the performance. Some of them are drunk and they whoop loudly every time that Dorothea takes the stage. No one sits quietly. They talk and eat and move around to get a better view. 

Hubert cannot say he finds much aesthetic value in the music, although both Yuri and Dorothea have voices worthy of the Mittelfrank still. And the plot is tedious. _The Flame Emperor at Tailtean_. It is a story he already knows. 

It is not elevated by Yuri snarling and bearing his teeth while wrapped in what appears to be a whole lion’s pelt of fur. And Dorothea is too tall and yet also too fragile, despite her white wig. 

The libretto is borderline seditious at some points. Dorothea portrays Edelgard as skirting the delicate border of tyranny. She is faintly ridiculous as well, a woman chasing after the church with all of the grace of a charging bull, tearing up the world with reckless abandon. Yuri plays his part as half-savior, half-madman. Hubert does not appreciate the laughs and cheers this draws from the onlookers. 

As the opera comes crashing towards its inevitable conclusion, Dorothea shares her final dance with Yuri, their voices twining in painful disharmony as they tread lightly through that final battle. Hubert recalls that the real affair was far less graceful. Edelgard had broken his spine with her final swing. She had been bleeding from a wound on her leg where the lance had torn through even her armor. They had hacked at one another, wild and vicious, until he had finally stopped moving. 

This time, though, it is a beautiful fight. 

And then Dorothea brings her axe down and Yuri screams. The audience goes silent. The music stops mid-phrase. Blood spurts from the wound and Yuri drops, shaking and senseless. And then Dorothea shrieks. 

“Oh Goddess, oh no, no!” she pants, no longer singing. She drops down beside the body, hands trembling as she attempts to stem the bleeding. “Someone help! Someone please, run and get help!” 

Hubert glances around, unsure if he should act. Someone down here must be trained in faith magic. Dorothea herself is known to be adept at it. And yet she is not summoning it. 

The chorus resumes singing, the tune changing from discord to a victory march. The musicians keep playing. Slowly, people in the crowd go still again. They turn their faces back to the stage and watch. 

“What are you doing?” Dorothea begs. Tears are running down her face and her voice cracks from the strain of screaming. “Help him! Someone! Why are you all just standing there? I need help!” 

The chorus continues to sing. 

_Hail the mighty Edelgard..._

“Please, I’m begging you, he’s going to die, please,” Dorothea groans, clutching Yuri’s limp body to her chest. The stain is still spreading across the fur cloak. “Help me, please, help me!” 

_Though red blood stains her story…_

“Why won’t you help me?” Dorothea screams in frustration. She begins to rock back and forth. The music grows louder, trying to drown her out. 

_Heavy as her crown may be, she will lead us all to glory…_

“I need you, please, please,” Dorothea sobs, her voice barely audible below the crash of symbols and the blare of horns. “I need help. I can't do this alone!” 

_To a brighter dawn, we shall carry on…_

The final lines of the song are cut out by Dorothea’s agonized wail. The players step forward to take their bows. 

No one applauds. Dorothea remains on the stage, shaking over Yuri’s lifeless body. 

The music ends. 

Slowly, people begin to move. They file out, back to Burrow Street, back to drink and cheer and business. 

Hubert waits until the audience is gone. The musicians are packing up their instruments. 

Yuri sits up and stretches. Dorothea offers him a hand and pulls him back to his feet. He sheds the fur and wipes some of the blood on his hands onto his shirt. 

“Enjoy the show?” he asks, eyes flicking to Hubert. “Or will we be dragged from our beds in the night and tortured for it?” 

There is nothing apologetic in Dorothea’s smile as she pulls the wig off and shakes her long dark curls down from their pins. 

“It was somewhat tedious in the second act,” Hubert replies. “I do not see the purpose of including such a long ballet where the emperor is topless.” 

“Ah, well,” Yuri shrugs and grins unrepentantly. “Theatre for the people, right?” 

“Indeed,” Hubert says. 

“How are things in the capital?” Dorothea asks, looking concerned. “Linhardt hasn’t written to us.” 

“Emperor Edelgard is growing stronger with treatment,” Hubert replies. “She sends her regrets that she was unable to attend.” 

“Oh, I’m not sure Edie would have liked our performance much,” Dorothea laughs. “She ought to concentrate on getting well, not our silly little play.” 

“She would have liked the ending,” Hubert says stiffly. 

Yuri narrows his eyes, but Dorothea smiles. 

“Theatre for the people,” she finally says. 

“I know you are adverse to an Imperial commission,” Hubert says, “but if there is anything I can do to clear a path for you, you need only ask.” 

He turns to leave, allow the players to mop up the blood, and prepare to tell their story again. 

“You sure you can’t stay for a drink?” Dorothea calls after him. “For old times sake?” 

“I am needed back in Enbarr,” Hubert replies without turning. “I have been absent too long.” 

He allows himself a private moment of nostalgia. 

When he’d said his most recent short farewell to her, she had been resting in her chambers, wrapped in blankets, but with the doors to the balcony open. He had knelt to pick up a few leaves that had blown in. 

She had looked up at him. There were still dark shadows under her eyes. Despite the transfusions, the healing was slower than the fading had been. She is but one woman. He forgets that sometimes when he is so in awe of her. 

He had stroked a lock of hair back from her face and then pressed his lips to the back of her hand. 

“You will return soon,” she had said. Yet again, a statement and a question. 

“I will,” he had replied. “As fast as I can.”

“We will need their help,” she had rasped out, her expression hard as iron despite her weakness. “We will need everyone if we want to fix things in the time that remains.” 

“Yes,” Hubert had agreed quietly. He did not let go of her hand. “There are many things I intend to do. In the time that remains.” 

When Hubert leaves Abyss, he turns his back on the monastery and rides hard on the fastest horse that can be bought. He has a woman who is waiting for him. He loves her more than he fears her now. 

And if he rides fast enough on the dark roads ahead, he can have her in his arms again by dawn. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> alt title: Dorothea invents the Brechtian epic theatre movement. thanks to the incredible Skreev for the lore check, inspiration, and sagely noting how much I co-opted from FE7!


End file.
